EMAIL: matt@teleport.com NAME: Matthew Tunnell TOPIC: Gadgets and Odd Devices COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Jar-O-Matic 2000 COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: http://www.teleport.com/~matt (not pov related) RENDERER USED: Povray 3.1e TOOLS USED: VB, Cmpeg, Notepad, DTA CREATION TIME: About 45 hours HARDWARE USED: 6(PII 266/64Mb) & 2(PII 350/64Mb) It's nice to work in IT. VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: Activemovie for Windows 95/NT works fine. ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: This animation shows a peanut butter jar with a stuck lid that presents little challenge to the Jar-O-Matic 2000. All that is required is a few turns on the cranks and the lid slides off easily. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: I wrote a sort of VB-Pov language binding which basically just prints POV commands to a file. I absolutely had to have persistent variables (hint, hint), and wanted more programming flexibility and speed. Originally, each frame was a separate file, but the queue would only hold 128 frames. Because of this limitation, I set the start and end clock the same as the start and end frame, and used a switch statement in the POV file with a case for every frame number. All objects are standard CSG. No modellers were used. The screws were done with routines in VB to generate smooth triangles. One full revolution is made in the INC file, then this is meshed and instanced as necessary. All camera and object movements are done with internal B-Splines. I used DTA a lot for quick looks at test renders.